Monday, July 20, 2009

New Developments

Gimme Shiny recently got a nice mention in Mashable! The article was about real-time TwitPic viewers, but the author threw Gimme Shiny in for good measure, even though it didn't support TwitPic. Well, why not? So, inspired by that, I whipped up a TwitPic-only mode, accessible via a special URL: http://gimmeshiny.com/?only=twitpic. I suppose at some point I'll add a way to access that mode (as well as the meta mode) via the UI, but for now you just have to know the URL. For that matter, one of these days I'll set it up so you can fine-tune the mixture of sources (such as watching Flickr and TwitPic but not deviantART) via URL and/or UI. At any rate, I think you'll find the new mode is pretty mesmerizing (and disturbing from time to time).

I've been making various other changes as well... for instance, when I first created the site, it would actually only load 25 images each from the image services and then just rotate through them. That would give you a nice dose of imagery, but it was certainly far from infinite. I've now fixed that; once it runs out of the first set of images, it gets a new set, and so on, so you can now literally sit and watch it for hours.

I've also updated it to use Safari's new CSS animations for the cross-fade, which makes a big difference on the iPhone (but also on the desktop Safari, version 4 or greater). It's still slower than I would like on the iPhone because it's not being smart yet about what size image to load; one of these days I'll fix that as well.

It's been great to see everyone's enthusiastic posts about the site on Twitter and elsewhere... thank you all, and keep spreading the word!